A participação popular no planejamento urbano: uma análise a partir de teses e dissertações acadêmicas

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyse popular participation in Brazilian urban planning based on the academic production of master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, seeking to identify to which participatory processes have effectively contributed to social empowerment and the democratization of urban governance more than two decades after the enactment of the City Statute. The investigation is grounded in a critical perspective on urban planning, anchored in the debate on the right to the city, the social function of property, and democratic Governance, understanding popular participation as a political practice situated in contexts marked by power disputes and structural inequalities. The theoretical and methodological framework of the research is based on content analysis as proposed by Bardin, adopting a qualitative and interpretative approach aimed identifying meanings, patterns, and contradictions in academic discourses. The research corpus of theses and dissertations developed across different fields of knowledge and territorial contexts, enabling a comparative and relational reading of the scientific production on popular participation in urban planning in Brazil. The study articulates thematic, categorical, and co-occurrence analysis, techniques, allowing the identification of key meaning clusters, forms of institutionalization of participation, and differentiated levels of society influence on urban decision-making processes. The findings indicate that although popular participation is widely recognized as a central normative principle of Brazilian urban planning, its effectiveness remains limited in most cases. Participatory processes are predominantly formal and consultative, often used to legitimize previously defined decisions, with a reduced capacity to redistribute decision-making power. At the same time, academic production highlights relevant indirect effects, such as the strengthening of citizenship, the expansion of political awareness, and the formation of social mobilization networks, suggesting that popular participation also functions as an educational and formative practice. It is concluded that popular participation in urban planning holds transformative potential but faces constraints associated with institutional fragility, the capture of participatory processes by economic interests, and social exclusion within deliberative spaces. The research reinforces the need to understand the democratization of urban governance as a process, whose effectiveness depends both on institutional structures and on the capacity of civil society for organization, mobilization and political formation.